Viviann Moana Wilmot (she/her)

Searching "liberated" Africans’ descendant archives for intergenerational practices of self-, meaning- and freedom-making (working title)

"They call our days liberation, / our feet know otherwise / this ground hurts" 
(Christiansë 2009, 25, lines 11-13) 

In her poem "We Are Not Sure", included in her volume Imprendehora (2009), scholar and poet Yvette Christiansë speaks to the experience of the group of approximately 200.000 people that were, misleadingly, classified as "liberated Africans" after having been rescued from illegally operating slaving ships in the wake of the Abolition of the Slave Trade from 1807 onwards. For most, the promise of "liberation" rarely came to pass. Instead, after one or multiple forced relocations, "liberated" Africans ended up scattered throughout sites of the Caribbean, Atlantic and Indian Ocean, where they were met with coerced labor, marital or military arrangements (cf. Adderley 2006, 126ff.; Christiansë 2020, 154; Lovejoy and Anderson 2020, 3; Richards 2025, 108ff.). A number of scholars have explored how "liberated" Africans were involuntary participants of what historian Laura Rosanne Adderley (2020, 176; 2006, 126f.) describes as the British social and free labor experiment of gendering a post-abolition society, while ensuring continued relations of labor exploitation. Some place particular interest in traces of "liberated" Africans self-advocacy as preserved within the archives (cf. e.g. Adderley 2006; Richards 2025; Rupprecht 2012). And yet, as the turn to Critical Archival Studies (Caswell et al. 2017) reminds us, any attempted glimpse at the inner "lives buried" (Hartman, 6) under colonial archival scrutiny remains "ordered" (Stoler 2002, 90) by the archive. Christiansë’s versed interjection above presents a unique trespassing of the "boundaries of the archive" (Hartman 2008, 9), quite literally turning to poetics as "strategy for disordering and transgressing [its] protocols" (ibid., 9f.). Her multifaceted engagement with and production of a critical history of "liberated" Africans includes scholarly and poetic work, all the while being rooted in her own familial heritage through her maternal grandmother. 

My PhD project takes up this incentive, seeking to explore "liberated" Africans’ his- and herstories "from the inside out" (Chamberlain 2011, 84). With alternative archives such as material culture (Miles 2021), home-based archives (Sutton 2024) or the community as record (Bastian 2003) being already established sources of knowledge in the overall study of slavery and abolition, these avenues remain largely underexplored and even underdefined in the study of "liberated" Africans. Adopting the methodology of Descendant Archival Practices (Sutton 2024), I shall explore three case studies of descendant archives of "liberated" Africans, including my own family archive. By engaging with the  "dual roles as both historians and descendants" (Field 2022, 632), I aim to explore "sources otherwise unavailable, deepening scholarly understanding of the relationship between history and memory" (ibid., 630), which may ultimately lead to a constructive linking of the formal and informal, (inter-)subjective and collective.

Bibliography

• Adderley, Laura Rosanne. 2020. “Household Labor and Sexual Coercion: Reconstructing Women’s Experience of African Recaptive Settlement.” In Liberated Africans and the Abolition of the Slave Trade, 1807–1896, edited by Henry B. Lovejoy and Richard Anderson. Rochester Studies in African History and the Diaspora. Boydell & Brewer.

• Sutton, Jazma. 2024. “‘Go to the Attics, the Closets, and the Basements’: Black Women’s Intergenerational Practices of Memory Keeping in Oxford, Ohio.” Genealogy 8 (3). https://doi.org/10.3390/genealogy8030102.

MA in Sociology, Leibniz University Hannover

BA in International Relations (major) und World History (minor), University of Erfurt

2019–2020
Student Assistant, German Centre for Higher Education Research and Science Studies, Hanover

2016–2019
Student Assistant, North American History, University of Erfurt